Other Computer Sciences Commons^™

Recommender Systems Research, Saverio Perugini

Saverio Perugini

We outline the history of recommender systems from their roots in information retrieval and filtering to their role in today’s Internet economy. Recommender systems attempt to reduce information overload and retain customers by selecting a subset of items from a universal set based on user preferences. Research in recommender systems lies at the intersection of several areas of computer science, such as artificial intelligence and human-computer interaction, and has progressed to an important research area of its own. It is important to note that recommendations are not delivered within a vacuum, but rather cast within an informal community of users …

Program Transformations For Information Personalization, Saverio Perugini

Saverio Perugini

Personalization constitutes the mechanisms and technologies necessary to customize information access to the end-user. It can be defined as the automatic adjustment of information content, structure, and presentation. The central thesis of this dissertation is that modeling interaction explicitly in a representation, and studying how partial information can be harnessed in it by program transformations to direct the flow of the interaction, can provide insight into, reveal opportunities for, and define a model for personalized interaction. To evaluate this thesis, a formal modeling methodology is developed for personalizing interactions with information systems, especially hierarchical hypermedia, based on program transformations. The …

A Generative Programming Approach To Interactive Information Retrieval: Insights And Experiences, Saverio Perugini, Naren Ramakrishnan

Saverio Perugini

We describe the application of generative programming to a problem in interactive information retrieval. The particular interactive information retrieval problem we study is the support for "out-of-turn interaction" with a website – how a user can communicate input to a website when the site is not soliciting such information on the current page, but will do so on a subsequent page. Our solution approach makes generous use of program transformations (partial evaluation, currying, and slicing) to delay the site’s current solicitation for input until after the user’s out-of-turn input is processed. We illustrate how studying out-of-turn interaction through a generative …

Realtime Query Expansion And Procedural Interfaces For Information Hierarchies, Saverio Perugini

Saverio Perugini

We demonstrate the use of two user interfaces for interacting with web hierarchies. One uses the dependencies underlying a hierarchy to perform real-time query expansion and, in this way, acts as an in situ feedback mechanism. The other enables the user to cascade the output from one interaction to the input of another, and so on, and, in this way, supports procedural information-seeking tasks without disrupting the flow of interaction.

Personalization By Program Slicing, Saverio Perugini, Naren Ramakrishnan

Saverio Perugini

Personalization involves customizing information access to the end-user. As any new area of computer science research it lacks formal models to guide the design of systems. In this paper, we present a modeling methodology, based on generative programming, for personalizing interactions with hierarchical websites. The methodology entails modeling a user’s interaction with a site in a program and applying program slicing to personalize the interaction. While preserving interactivity, this approach does not require the designer to anticipate all possible user interactions a priori and provide interfaces for each. Moreover, it provides a theoretical, systematic, and implementation-neutral way to design systems …

The Good, Bad And The Indifferent: Explorations In Recommender System Health, Benjamin J. Keller, Sun-Mi Kim, N. Srinivas Vemuri, Naren Ramakrishnan, Saverio Perugini

Saverio Perugini

Our work is based on the premise that analysis of the connections exploited by a recommender algorithm can provide insight into the algorithm that could be useful to predict its performance in a fielded system. We use the jumping connections model defined by Mirza et al. [6], which describes the recommendation process in terms of graphs. Here we discuss our work that has come out of trying to understand algorithm behavior in terms of these graphs. We start by describing a natural extension of the jumping connections model of Mirza et al., and then discuss observations that have come from …

Personalization By Website Transformation: Theory And Practice, Saverio Perugini

Saverio Perugini

We present an analysis of a progressive series of out-of-turn transformations on a hierarchical website to personalize a user’s interaction with the site. We formalize the transformation in graph-theoretic terms and describe a toolkit we built that enumerates all of the traversals enabled by every possible complete series of these transformations in any site and computes a variety of metrics while simulating each traversal therein to qualify the relationship between a site’s structure and the cumulative effect of support for the transformation in a site. We employed this toolkit in two websites. The results indicate that the transformation enables users …

Staging Transformations For Multimodal Web Interaction Management, Michael Narayan, Christopher Williams, Saverio Perugini, Naren Ramakrishnan

Saverio Perugini

Multimodal interfaces are becoming increasingly ubiquitous with the advent of mobile devices, accessibility considerations, and novel software technologies that combine diverse interaction media. In addition to improving access and delivery capabilities, such interfaces enable flexible and personalized dialogs with websites, much like a conversation between humans. In this paper, we present a software framework for multimodal web interaction management that supports mixed-initiative dialogs between users and websites. A mixed-initiative dialog is one where the user and the website take turns changing the flow of interaction. The framework supports the functional specification and realization of such dialogs using staging transformations – …

A Partner-Matching Framework For Social Activity Communities, Chunyu Ai, Wei Zhong, Mingyuan Yan, Feng Gu

Publications and Research

A lot of daily activities require more than one person to participate and collaborate with each other; however, for many people, it is not easy to find good partners to engage in activities with one another. With the rapid growth of social network applications, more and more people get used to creating connections with people on the social network. Therefore, designing social network framework for partner-matching is significant in helping people to easily find good partners. In this paper, we proposed a framework which can match partners for an active community. In order to improve the matching performance, all users …

Interactive Feature Selection And Visualization For Large Observational Data, Jingyuan Wang

Doctoral Dissertations

Data can create enormous values in both scientific and industrial fields, especially for access to new knowledge and inspiration of innovation. As the massive increases in computing power, data storage capacity, as well as capability of data generation and collection, the scientific research communities are confronting with a transformation of exploiting the advanced uses of the large-scale, complex, and high-resolution data sets in situation awareness and decision-making projects. To comprehensively analyze the big data problems requires the analyses aiming at various aspects which involves of effective selections of static and time-varying feature patterns that fulfills the interests of domain users. …

Social Fingerprinting: Identifying Users Of Social Networks By Their Data Footprint, Denise Koessler Gosnell

Doctoral Dissertations

This research defines, models, and quantifies a new metric for social networks: the social fingerprint. Just as one's fingers leave behind a unique trace in a print, this dissertation introduces and demonstrates that the manner in which people interact with other accounts on social networks creates a unique data trail. Accurate identification of a user's social fingerprint can address the growing demand for improved techniques in unique user account analysis, computational forensics and social network analysis.

In this dissertation, we theorize, construct and test novel software and methodologies which quantify features of social network data. All approaches and methodologies are …

Ranking Methods For Global Optimization Of Molecular Structures, John Norman Mcmeen Jr

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This work presents heuristics for searching large sets of molecular structures for low-energy, stable systems. The goal is to find the globally optimal structures in less time or by consuming less computational resources. The strategies intermittently evaluate and rank structures during molecular dynamics optimizations, culling possible weaker solutions from evaluations earlier, leaving better solutions to receive more simulation time. Although some imprecision was introduced from not allowing all structures to fully optimize before ranking, the strategies identify metrics that can be used to make these searches more efficient when computational resources are limited.

Using Spectral Analysis To Evaluate Flute Tone Quality, Ron Yorita

Master's Theses

Many skilled flutists place a high priority on "good" tone quality, or timbre. Timbre can be defined as the audible difference in character that a listener perceives for two notes played at the same pitch. Different timbres are determined by the combination and balance of harmonics that comprise a note. Unlike pitch and rhythm, timbre is difficult to objectively quantify. This project explores (1) how tone quality is described by skilled flutists, (2) whether the harmonic spectrum has some correlation with tone quality, (3) whether certain harmonic spectra are preferred, or considered "good".

Thirty-one flutists ranging from high school students …

Bm3d Image Denoising Using Ssim Optimized Wiener Filter, Mahmud Hasan

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Image denoising is considered as a salient pre-processing in sophisticated imaging applications. Over decades, numerous studies have been conducted in denoising. Recently proposed Block Matching and 3D (BM3D) Filtering added a new dimension to the study of denoising. BM3D is the current state-of-the-art of denoising and is capable of achieving better denoising as compared to any other existing method. However, the performance is not yet on the bound for image denoising. Therefore, there is scope to improve BM3D to achieve high quality denoising. In this thesis, to improve BM3D, we first attempted to improve Wiener filter (the core of BM3D) …

High-Resolution Digital 3d Models Of Algar Do Penico Chamber: Limitations, Challenges, And Potential, Ivo Silvestre M.Sc., José I. Rodrigues Phd, Mauro Figueiredo Phd, Cristina Veiga-Pires Phd

International Journal of Speleology

The study of karst and its geomorphological structures is important for understanding the relationships between hydrology and climate over geological time. In that context, we conducted a terrestrial laser-scan survey to map geomorphological structures in the karst cave of Algar do Penico in southern Portugal. The point cloud data set obtained was used to generate 3D meshes with different levels of detail, allowing the limitations of mapping capabilities to be explored.

In addition to cave mapping, the study focuses on 3D-mesh analysis, including the development of two algorithms for determination of stalactite extremities and contour lines, and on the interactive …

Dynamic Resource Management In Virtualized Data Centres, Gaston Keller

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

In the last decade, Cloud Computing has become a disruptive force in the computing landscape, changing the way in which software is designed, deployed and used over the world. Its adoption has been substantial and it is only expected to continue growing. The growth of this new model is supported by the proliferation of large-scale data centres, built for the express purpose of hosting cloud workloads. These data centres rely on systems virtualization to host multiple workloads per physical server, thus increasing their infrastructures' utilization and decreasing their power consumption. However, the owners of the cloud workloads expect their applications' …

Techniques For Efficient Execution Of Large-Scale Scientific Workflows In Distributed Environments, Selim Kalayci

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Scientific exploration demands heavy usage of computational resources for large-scale and deep analysis in many different fields. The complexity or the sheer scale of the computational studies can sometimes be encapsulated in the form of a workflow that is made up of numerous dependent components. Due to its decomposable and parallelizable nature, different components of a scientific workflow may be mapped over a distributed resource infrastructure to reduce time to results. However, the resource infrastructure may be heterogeneous, dynamic, and under diverse administrative control. Workflow management tools are utilized to help manage and deal with various aspects in the lifecycle …

Designing Efficient And Accurate Behavior-Aware Mobile Systems, Abhinav Parate

Doctoral Dissertations

The proliferation of sensors on smartphones, tablets and wearables has led to a plethora of behavior classification algorithms designed to sense various aspects of individual user's behavior such as daily habits, activity, physiology, mobility, sleep, emotional and social contexts. This ability to sense and understand behaviors of mobile users will drive the next generation of mobile applications providing services based on the users' behavioral patterns. In this thesis, we investigate ways in which we can enhance and utilize the understanding of user behaviors in such applications. In particular, we focus on identifying the key challenges in the following three aspects …

Model-Driven Analytics Of Energy Meter Data In Smart Homes, Sean K. Barker

Doctoral Dissertations

The proliferation of smart meter deployments has led to significant interest in analyzing home energy use as part of the emerging 'smart grid'. As buildings account for nearly 40% of society's energy use, data from smart meters provides significant opportunities for both utilities and consumers to optimize energy use, minimize waste, and provide insight into how modern homes and devices use energy. Meter data is often difficult to analyze, however, owing to the aggregation of many disparate and complex loads as well as relatively coarse measurement granularities. At utility scales, analysis is further complicated by the vast quantity of data, …

Designing A Bayer Filter With Smooth Hue Transition Interpolation Using The Xilinx System Generator, Zhiqiang Li, Peter Revesz

CSE Conference and Workshop Papers

This paper describes the design of a Bayer filter with smooth hue transition using the System Generator for DSP. We describe and compare experimentally two different designs, one based on a MATLAB implementation and the other based on a modification of the Bayer filter using bilinear interpolation.